This is me

Hi there. I'm Maggie. I'm a 21 year old college student and also an aspiring author. I have this blog to discuss silly things like books, writing, and my famous boyfriends. If you send me pictures of puppies, I won't hate it.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

ARE YOU BAFFLED BY THIS ONE? BECAUSE CARRIE HARRIS IS BASICALLY THE MOST NINJA PERSON TO EVER EXIST. Squeal with me, please. *squeeeee!*

Ahem. Now that the fan!girl is over.

Ms. Harris is super busy being awesome, but somehow she made time for an interview with us! (Yesss.) She writes about things like zombie footballers, and her website has monsters all over it. I am a big fan of footballers, zombies, and monsters, so she's always been pretty snazzy to me. Without further ado... the interview!

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Okay, first off, it's the question every author has had to answer a thousand and two times; will you tell us about your book Bad Taste in Boys?

Well. BAD TASTE IN BOYS is about a girl named Kate Grable. Kate’s a super smart med geek, and she’s the student trainer for her high school football team. She figures the experience will look good on her college apps, and as an added bonus she gets to be close to her quarterback crush, Aaron. Then something disturbing happens. Kate finds out that the coach has given the team steroids. Except...the vials she finds don’t exactly contain steroids. Whatever’s in them is turning hot gridiron hunks into mindless, flesh-eating...zombies.

Unless she finds an antidote, no one is safe. Not Aaron, not Kate’s brother, not her best friend...not even Kate...

Dum dum DUM.

I think it's obvious to everyone that your cover makes people want to kiss it. Those lips! That creepy-coolness! How much input did you have in the design?

I know; isn’t it frawesome? I feel so lucky cover-wise. The people at Random House awe me.

From what I’ve heard, most authors aren’t involved in covers at all, so I’m super lucky to have a fabulous editor who asked me for my opinion. It was so fun to look around at everything out there and send her covers that I liked. Of course, what I came up with wasn’t half as cool as the cover they gave me. I can’t explain how my designer heard the words “zombie football players” and came up with sugar lips, but it’s really a stroke of brilliance!

I always hate being stuck when writing. When you reach a particularly rough area in your story where you just don't know what direction to take, do you like to wait for inspiration to hit or would you rather tough it out and fix it later?

I hate it too, but I always find that those tough spots end up being the kewlest part of the book. Strange how that works out. So I might wait for a day or two to see what I come up with, but otherwise I just slog through. That’s the fun part about writing a first draft—it’s okay to suck! I say you should embrace the suck! Once you get to edits, then you can make it pretty. But on that first draft I’m just trying to get from the beginning to the end without any holes the size of Kansas. If I do that, I consider it a good excuse to throw a party.

I’m partial to bacon parties, but I try not to do that too often, because it’s bad for the cholesterol. At the last bacon party I threw, somebody showed up with facon (fake bacon). ICK!

I'm kind of in love with your website. (But it's not like a check it obsessively or anything. Psh! Heh...) Did you design the monsters?

Aww, thanks! I feel kind of like an idiot, because I visit my own website and admire it. But that’s just because my web designer did just a wicked good job! A lot of the monsters are based on things that pop up in my stories and books, like the merpire and the pirate djinn. I’d send him a paragraph describing what I wanted, and then my designer would telepathically PULL THE PICTURE FROM MY HEAD. It was honestly very freaky. I wouldn’t ever want to play cards against him, because I would LOSE.

What would be the best advice you could give a teen who would like to have a future in writing?

I think there are a lot of people out there who will tell you what you should write, and how you should write it, and what you should wear when you write it. (Personally, I find that dressing up like a zombie ninja really gets the writing juices flowing.) But there is no RIGHT way to write. Find the way that works for you. By all means, take time to learn the rules, because then you’ll know when it’s the right time to break them. But ultimately you’ll find that some of the rules contradict each other, and the only way to follow them all is to develop multiple personalities. I don’t really recommend that.

And finally, the most difficult of the list: QUICK FAST HURRY WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE MONSTER?

Sparkly merpire princess, of course. It’s what I call myself in my head. Egotistical much? Not really. I could call myself Sparkly Merpire QUEEN. Or Sparkly Merpire EMPRESS OF THE UNIVERSE. Or Sparkly Merpire BESTSELLER.Hmmm…I like how that last one sounds. I may have to apply for an imaginary name change.

ohmigod maggie AWESOME interview! carrie sounds sooo amazing, and her book's plot sort of blew my mind. cant wait to read it, when it releases like, about a year later. :Dand the cover--PURE GORGEOUS. i shall now go lust after it.(er, wait, did i sound lewd when i said that? oops.)

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